The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (4 page)

“Wait, what?” Akhil’s eyes widened.

“Sunil Uncle sleepwalks?” Amina had only ever seen Scooby-Doo sleepwalk. She didn’t know real people could do it.

Mary-the-Cook frowned. “Not important. Akhil, hand me an onion.”

“Where does he go?” Amina imagined Sunil Uncle in the kitchen, making himself a six-foot-long hoagie.

“Akhil! Onion!”

Akhil reached into the basket behind him. “Seriously? All the time? Like, every night?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Mary-the-Cook said. “I am only saying that Thomas should be coming home. If he waits any longer, it will be too late.”

“Have you tried to wake him up?” Akhil asked. “Because that’s dangerous, you know. He could attack.”

“Waking him? What fool would try to wake him? We are too busy trying to keep our own selves safe from harm.”

“He hurts you?”

“Not me,
things
. He hurts things only.”

“What things?”

“Things he himself has bought! The china for Amma’s sixtieth
birthday. That television set—you remember? Smashed like one cheap toy. The dentistry chair with its three reclining positions
and
the overhanging lamp.”

Akhil’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know he’s sleepwalking?”

“What fool will break things he himself has saved up so long to buy? He’s not Thomas, he can’t be breaking and buying new all the time. And you should see how he cries over it the next day!”

“Wow.” Akhil looked impressed. “Psycho.”

“Psycho,” Mary-the-Cook agreed, shearing the ends off the onion with a rusty blade.

“Well,” Akhil said after a pause. “Dad always says Sunil Uncle didn’t want to live here or be a dentist, that Ammachy forced him when he didn’t get into medical school. Maybe he’s doing it to—”

“Are you even listening?” Mary-the-Cook asked. “He’s not
doing
anything, he’s sleeping!”

“I mean subconsciously, duh.” Akhil rolled his eyes.

“Sub?”

“You know, like what he wishes he could do while he was awake but can’t.”

“And what exactly is that?” Ammachy’s voice, sharp as a blade, pierced through the darkened doorway. She materialized an instant later, curled like a shrimp, her eyes fixed furiously on Mary-the-Cook.

“Oh, hi, Ammachy.” Akhil smiled bravely. “We were just—”

“I thought I told you to stay out of the kitchen.” Her teeth glinted in the bad light.

“We just came for water. OW!” Akhil yelped as his grandmother grabbed a handful of his chub.

“If I catch you in here again, I will beat you with a stick. Understand?”

What wasn’t there to understand? Amina made hastily for the door, Akhil coming up behind her. He pushed her out, and they both skittered across the darkened yard, careening around a pile of coconuts and through the pomegranate trees before running up the verandah steps. Only when they were safely at the top did they dare look back at the kitchen, where Ammachy shouted a storm of Tamil at Mary-the-Cook, who minced the onion with shamed gusto.

“Jesus!” Akhil glowered. “What was she … 
spying
? She spies on us now?”

“She spied on us last time, too, remember?” Amina reminded him. “She spies on everyone, all the time. Anyway, you shouldn’t have said that about Sunil Uncle.”

“Why not? Everyone knows he’s been unhappy for, like,
years
. Even Dad says he should have gotten out of Salem a long time ago, when he had the chance.” Akhil rubbed his waist where he had been pinched. “So the truth hurts! Fuck her!”

“Fuck her!” Itty shouted from behind them, and Amina screamed. Her cousin’s white sneakers glowed as he unfolded himself from behind Ammachy’s chair. He looked at them expectantly. “Cricket?”

“It’s too dark,” Akhil said, and Itty’s face sank. It seemed to Amina that her cousin waited the entire two years between their visits peering anxiously at the gate with ball in hand.

“We’ll play tomorrow,” Amina promised, and Itty nodded miserably.

“Hullo? Roof?” he tried, a close second in favorite activities.

“Nah,” Akhil said.

“I’ll go with you,” Amina said.

Minutes later the two of them stepped off the upstairs verandah to the tiny ledge, climbing the ladder that would take them up to the roof. There, with the last burn of the sunset on the horizon and smoke from dinnertime fires growing, Amina could finally see over the Wall. The thoroughfare was clogged with its usual stagnating life, sluggish buses and cars honking in steady lines while rickshaws and bikes ran around them like beetles. The beggar children from the morning had scattered across the street, approaching any vehicle that slowed down long enough for them to get a hand through the window. Amina breathed in deep, sucking down the smell of gasoline and cooking onions, of cow dung and sewage and sweat, and Itty hummed to himself. Amina watched him watching Salem until it was too dark to see much of anything, and held the hand he offered to lead her back down into the safety of her bedroom.

Dinner that night was extravagant and tough. Burned by a chastened Mary-the-Cook, it was eaten joylessly while the adults discussed Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency (“a colossal mistake,” according to Thomas), and something called the Janata Party, which Amina thought sounded like something that might involve pajamas and cake.

“You watch,” Ammachy said, pulling a thin chicken bone out from between her teeth and setting it on the edge of her plate. “These people are the same as every other political group. They talk and talk of change, and then they will do their best to bring the country crashing to its knees.”

“Nonsense.” Thomas helped himself to more rice. “We survived the British. You really think we can’t handle ourselves?”

Sunil snorted from the far end of the table, where he had settled with pink eyes and a slur.

“Not the same, Thomas,” Ammachy said. “An enemy from outside is easier to manage than chaos from within. And now there are so many of factions growing! Anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, antieveryone!”

“Ah no!” Kamala clucked.

“T. C. Roy himself said there was a mob in Madras.” Divya tried to shovel a handful of rice into Itty’s moving mouth. “He couldn’t even get out of the car for fear of his life!”

“Seriously?” Akhil looked worried.

“
Pah
—Roy’s a hysterical.” Thomas waved a dismissive hand. “You watch, things will even out again. It’s a pendulum, no? Things swing one way, then the other, but India herself always thrives.”

“Well, s’all very easy to say when you’re gone, isn’t it?” Sunil mashed rice between his fingers.

Thomas puffed up a little. “So I’m not allowed to have an opinion, is it?”

“I’m just saying, it’s easy to look back with rosey-posey glasses when you live on the other side of the earth itself, nah? But those of us that live here, we have to deal with realities, you see. So it’s quite different for us.”

“Obviously. I wasn’t saying India was an easy place to live, I just—”

“Well, it’s not a
hard
place to live,” Sunil interrupted indignantly.
“We’ve got all the modern amenities you do now. Refrigeration. Television. Movies and
whatnot
. Take a look around you, nah, brother? Things have changed.”

“Who needs water?” Kamala asked.

“It was a simple statement, Sunil.” Thomas moved small piles of food around his plate. “I was just saying that India has survived some three thousand years of change; she will survive a few more.”

“She will
sssssurvive!
” Sunil crowed, raising fists into the air. “Did everyone hear it? The good doctor says we’ll live! Thank God himself!”

And what would happen now? In the bulging silence that followed, Amina watched as veins pulsed and rose on Thomas’s forehead and Sunil leaned forward.

“You’re a drunk,” Thomas said.

“You’re an ass,” Sunil shot back.

“Enough!” Ammachy smacked her hand on the dining table. “My God, grown men acting like small boys! Can’t the first night pass without you ruining it?”

The cloud that descended on the table was potent enough for even Amina to realize that the first night had been ruined already. She looked from her grandmother to Divya to Kamala to Akhil, each face more uncomfortable than the last with the exception of Itty, who was peeking gleefully under the tablecloth at his just-remembered shoes.

“Don’t get yourself so bothered, Amma,” Thomas said at last, breaking his gaze from Sunil’s. “We’re just talking is all, right, brother?”

At the end of the table, Sunil sat with his eyes closed, his finger raised into the air as though taking the temperature. He pointed it at Thomas and pulled an invisible trigger before opening his eyes again. Then he lifted his glass and downed the last inch of gold.

“Right,” he said.

CHAPTER 2

T
he sun rose flat and hard the next morning.

Hot. She was already getting hot. How could this be winter? Amina tried to imagine the New Mexico she had just left, the stars sprayed over the black sky, the December air turning her breath into white puffs, and found she could not. India was too much to imagine anything else.

In the cracked bathroom mirror, her black hair stood up from her head, while her nose was pocked with tiny red mosquito bites. It exaggerated the overall effect of her face (long, thin, too beaky to ever be considered beautiful), making her, she worried, as ugly as her grandmother predicted. She backed up, hoping against all odds that something had happened to make her boobs grow in overnight. It had not. Stepping into the tiled basin behind her, she reached into the pink plastic bucket and ladled a cup of lukewarm water over her head.

When she descended the stairs ten minutes later, she found Ammachy, Divya, and her parents hunched over a spicy breakfast. She
looked in vain for Mary-the-Cook, who might slip her a piece of cinnamon toast, but the servant girls were there in her place, and neither looked particularly helpful.

“Hello, monkeysoup!” Thomas smiled and pointed to the chair next to him.
Sit
. “You sleep okay?”

Amina nodded. “Where’s Akhil?”

“Outside playing cricket with Itty.”

“They’re not eating?”

“They ate already.”

“Oh.” The soupy smell of sambar made her stomach turn a little. “Can I go, too? I’m not really even hungry.”

“No.” Ammachy placed three round idlis on her plate. “Eat.”

“I can’t eat that much.”

“Start.”

Amina picked up an idli, scowling. India sucked.

“So Preetham will take us and kids to zoo in the afternoon,” Kamala said. “And should we take a rickshaw back? Thomas, what do you think? Or you and Sunil can drop us and then go to the bank together?”

“Sure.” Thomas took a sip of coffee. “Whatever works.”

“Actually, Thomas and I are going to Dr. Abraham’s office at eleven,” Ammachy announced. “So we will need Preetham.”

“What?” Thomas’s eyebrows rose with surprise.

“He’s arranged for us to have a small tour of the facilities. Afterward we’ll go to his house for lunch.”

“But we can’t.” Thomas struggled to keep his face calm. “I told Sunil I would go to the bank with him today and get the papers.”

“Where’s Sunil Uncle, anyway?” Amina asked.

“Chutney or sambar?” Kamala motioned for her plate.

“Sugar.”

Ammachy ladled enough sambar to float a legion of idlis across Amina’s plate, saying to Thomas, “Sunil will not be out of bed until twelve itself, if we are so lucky. You and he can go after.”

“Twelve? In the afternoon?” Amina asked.

“Less talking, more eating,” Kamala urged.

Thomas glared at Ammachy. “I already told you—”

“It’s
arranged
, Thomas. I
myself
arranged it. Now, please don’t make some fuss.”

Sunil Uncle must have gone sleepwalking again! Amina was sure of it. Why else would he be in bed until twelve in the afternoon? She imagined him ambling through the yard in the middle of the night, arms stretched in front of him, feet wandering idly over roots and grass.

“How did everyone sleep?” she asked, looking hopefully at the adults around the table. No one would look back at her, not even Kamala.

Ammachy swiped her forefinger across a dot of sambar on the table. “It’s just a tour, Thomas, nothing more. You can decide for yourself if it’s something you want to pursue after that.”